alt Hacker NewsI think the target of the anger here should be (at least in part): OneDrive.
My understanding is that a modern, default onedrive setup will push all your onedrive folder contents to the cloud, but will not do the same in reverse -- it's totally possible to have files in your cloud onedrive, visible in your onedrive folder, but that do not exist locally. If you want to access such a file, it typically gets downloaded from onedrive for you to use.
If that's the case, what is Backblaze or another provider to do? Constantly download your onedrive files (that might have been modified on another device) and upload them to backblaze? Or just sync files that actually exist locally? That latter option certainly would not please a consumer, who would expect the files they can 'see' just get magically backed up.
It's a tricky situation and I'm not saying Backblaze handled it well here, but the whole transparent cloud storage situation thing is a bit of a mess for lots of people. If Dropbox works the same way (no guaranteed local file for something you can see), that's the same ugly situation.
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If you want to access your file, it gets downloaded. If Backblaze wants to check if your file has been changed, it doesn’t need to have the file downloaded - that’s what modification time is for. And file size.
Most have pointed out that the OneDrive exclusion makes sense due to its complexity. But I see no one here defending the undocumented .git exclusion. That’s pretty egregious - if I’m backing up that directory it’s always 100% intentional and it definitely feels like a sacrifice to the product functionality for stability and performance. Not documenting it just twists the knife.